


Hyperthymesia

by naaz



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Armitage Hux Has Feelings, Multi, Not Canon Compliant - Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Not compliant with anything after Force Awakens, Past Lives, Reylux OT3, Soulmates, When your working triad is interrupted by the force being a dick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-09
Updated: 2020-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:48:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23077306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/naaz/pseuds/naaz
Summary: Armitage Hux has known them before. Thousands of years, hundreds of lifetimes.
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Kylo Ren, Armitage Hux/Rey, Armitage Hux/Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 4
Kudos: 34





	Hyperthymesia

He's been Sith before… a human slave in the early days of the empire when the force hadn’t been near-mythical and teetering on the brink of extinction. He’d walked the sands of Korriban and traveled between the planets of the Sith people. He’d felt the power. It had been tangible and real – it’d shaped the lives of everyone the galaxy over. He could remember the bite of the energy and his own cold rage turning to tight, molten power behind his breastbone and in his fingertips.

He’d wielded power then. It’d been one of the few lifetimes so early on where he hadn’t needed to cling to men more powerful or be bound to their whims. Still, hundreds and hundreds of years later he misses that feeling of control and raw energy in his hands.

Snoke is not an unknown entity. He comes nowhere close to the most terrifying being that Hux remembers, that he’s _dealt_ with. No matter how hard Snoke batters the weight of his presence against Hux’s skull the dark force user can not get in.

With his jaw set and teeth grit it’s hard not to bear fangs. Hux grows tired of being the second most powerful man in any given room and his fingers are still bloodied from the climb this high. He’s the second most powerful. He doesn’t count Ben. _Kylo_ might be dangerous but he was Ben first; he’d been ben before.

When Hux had seen him at Snoke’s side the very first time with nothing but misguided rage and a desire for power that amounted to nothing – he’d still been Ben. Ben Solo. Ben-Once-His-Soulmate-Solo. He can still taste it in his mouth every time he sees the shades of Ben. That rush of saliva to his mouth as his stomach twists and acid touches his throat. He’d thought he’d hardened his heart to wanting _them_ but there was still this physical pain, this burn. They never remembered him the way he remembered them. Hux had forced himself to a vibroblade’s edge: deadly from all angles and able to parry the wildest of Kylo Ren’s temper tantrums. He has no time for this, none at all.

He has an empire to build and a name to make.

Still it could be worse. This isn’t the most unfortunate of dispositions Ben had ever taken. She was inherently more difficult but Ben could be a friend, a lover, or the bitterest of his enemies. This was nothing new.

There were times the impotent rage almost amused him. This was hardly the first time they didn’t like each other. Hux had ignored them before in favor of different goals, made himself _both_ of their enemies. This was _hardly_ the first time that Ben, Kylo, Ymir, Sax, whatever name he carried whichever time had looked at him with barely restrained desire to kill.

(If the Force had wanted more suitable meet-cutes it should’ve chosen one of the other two to remember.)

Hux contents himself to galactic domination. He’s had them before and never managed to keep them. Perhaps he could keep the galaxy.

—

_She_ is the problem.

She is _always_ the problem.

There’s an unfortunate pattern that arises early in the cycle of their lives: she is always on the other side.

Often it means that Hux never so much as meets her. Sometimes there’s no way to cross the distances between them and she’s just a folk hero on a backwater planet who’s ideologically opposed to them. When that happens she marries young and quiet and dies just the same.

Other times, she’s the fiercest of his enemies. Of _their_ enemies. She has the irritating propensity to be the messiah of her people, the chosen one. Every time the whisper of a prophecy crosses his ear, liberation from an unseen evil, a usurper soon to come and topple the government of a corrupt planet, he’s sure it will be her. Even if he tries not to check, or look, or follow up on _anything_ – it is always her.

When he had been a Sith, she was a Jedi and she hated him like only someone who wrestled with anger and darkness and came out the other side could. They claimed she was _fated_ to meet him in battle, so she had.

(Ben had been a member of a trade corporation in _that life_ : a man with a pretty smile and ambitions just shy of too big for the high station he’d been born into. He’d found his way into Hux’s arms and learned how dangerous it was to be loved by a Sith. This was well before Hux hardened his heart.)

In that world, she’d brought him low and on Ben’s pleading had taken her lightsaber from his throat. Ben had brought her into the fold more than he had. His quiet voice and deep murmurs reached her eventually and she became _gray_ : left the order and decided to love Ben. That meant loving Hux too. She learned.

It should follow that the tether of their connections should be thinner than his tether to Ben. There was never _her_ without _Ben_ and when he’d met her before without that buffer there had been violence and hate. He could undo her in words – he didn’t have to resort to flesh and sinew if he didn’t so choose.

But the _moment_ that he sees her an earthquake runs through him as the seismic plates of his surface shift. Cracks form in his resolve and he would bite through his tongue if he thought it would make the pain at the center of his chest go away.

Here: she is Rey – a backwater girl from a distant junkyard planet with tanned skin and frizzy hair that sends fly-aways into her face. When she sweats those errant hairs stick to her face. Her lips chap and crack when she speaks to Kylo through gritted teeth and the force of her – of her presence and her being and the thrum of lightening that leaves ozone in her wake takes Hux’s breath away for his desire to consume her whole.

He is an outsider. Kylo and Rey share a bond in the force that he is not privy to but he knows what it felt like when he was Sith and she was Jedi and their minds had been one.

It’s not that he doesn’t think Kylo can’t _handle_ that connection, it’s that he’s been intimately involved with it. He knows the way it tugs and tugs until there is no more of you to give. Thousands of years later he can still taste her lips. He knows Ben. Knows the hidden sweetness of his disposition and that he needs approval at his core.

Hux is right. Kylo is unhinged by her. She’s in his holding cell and he refuses to kill her when Snoke suggests as much. Kylo flies into a rage at the suggestion and Hux feels his shoulders stiffen but Snoke watches with amused interest at his apprentice’s latest tantrum. They agree eventually to more permanent captivity and Hux will take it for what it is. For a moment he believes it _may_ be fine – his plans may be unchanged, but then Rey refuses Kylo entry into her mind and Ben rears his head again. That hurt boy, so angry at being turned away, loses all good sense and is undone by a child, by a girl ten years his lesser.

Ben may be the bridge between Hux and Rey but Hux has always been a natural mediator. Without him standing between them the two could likely burn the world and not realize until they stopped to try and figure out where the smoke came from.

He tells himself that he is not their mediator here. He’s not even their lover in this world, in this lifetime. He has no need to make sure that they survive or that either of them are whole and happy. He owes them no fealty, no due, nothing at all.

Armitage Hux has a destiny that is not tied to Rey or even to Kylo Ren. Both are a means to an end and he will tell himself that over and over until he begins to believe it.

—

It’s never so simple. Nothing about this has ever been simple.

He curses Kylo Ren and Ben both as he carries the other man over his shoulders and back towards the Finalizer. A life’s work and all his ambitions were destroyed just moments after what was undoubtedly his greatest triumph in a hundred lifetimes. He had brought the galaxy to its knees and, at that moment when he might finally rid himself of one of his pinpricks of distraction – the tether that bound him to his single-minded focus had snapped.

He cannot let Kylo Ren die. He cannot let _Ben_ die even if Ben is just a shadow inside of a mask. Cannot. _Cannot_. It does against the way that his heart clatters inside of his chest, arrhythmic, and his muscles _scream_ as he tries to keep himself from running while the world crumbles below. He might lose his foothold and if he loses his foothold he falls. If he falls they die. All this for naught.

If both of them should meet their end he knew that Rey might still be able to celebrate but just the thought of her (brown skin and warmth, chapped lips and the fire that burned bright at her core) was enough to steady his steps.

There was never a plan to bring her into the fold. Kylo was only barely obedient and Hux felt he had no grasp on either of them. Rey had nearly killed Kylo, nearly killed _Ben_ , and though Kylo had nearly killed her too Hux hadn’t been so acutely aware of his own pain then.

To the Force when them both. 

To the Force with their freedom to forget, and move on, and live lives all their own. 

To the force with this _entire_ cycle for all it’s done to him, to them, their lives and loves and every time he’s seen them die.

The ship is just over the horizon and he dreams of warmth as he marches towards it with single-minded determination and one-half of the known force users in the galaxy resting on his shoulders.

**Author's Note:**

> So this is a thing I had saved in google drive for probably a year and a half and just now decided to rewrite and publish. I think where it ends now *kind* of works as an end? I can't promise this'll be continued but if the spirit takes up residence in me I promise I'll deliver it right to you. 
> 
> Please comment!


End file.
